On the eve of the 20th anniversary of moving Kazakhstan’s capital from Almaty to Astana, the country’s government announced that the city of Astana has welcomed its one-millionth resident. Indeed, this was a remarkable achievement for the city, which within just 20 years – between 1997 and 2018 – grew from a population of only 290,000 to more than 1.1 million inhabitants, or more than 300 percent. Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev envisions that the population of Astana could exceed three million by 2050. Therefore, the main question is whether Kazakhstan can sustain this rapid urbanization shift without facing major social and demographic upheaval.

In late May, Nakhichevan-based Azerbaijani forces entered no-man’s land to the northwest of the exclave, formally part of Armenia, as deep as 10-15 kilometers. The territory was occupied without a single shot, and represents a physically larger portion of land than that acquired by Azerbaijan as a result of the April 2016 clashes. As the Armenian public was preoccupied with the toppling of the regime of Serzh Sargsyan and the Pashinyan government’s subsequent anti-corruption initiatives, the “silent occupation” of land in Armenia’s Vayotz Dzor province went virtually unnoticed. Since further advances into Armenian territory are likely to force Russia’s response, both sides remain cautious to avoid further confrontations.

A strategic deployment of trade corridors is taking shape across Afghanistan and Iran as both India and China subvert each other’s trade strategies through key geoeconomic states. Afghanistan’s land corridor to Chabahar port connects it to India by sea, creating a Persian-Gulf to Caspian Sea corridor, while the Afghan air corridor to India provides a parallel, more direct trade route. By contrast, China’s twin economic corridors in the region run perpendicular: north-south through Pakistan to the Gulf, and east-west through Iran to Istanbul. Pakistan’s Gwadar and Iran’s Chabahar are thus effectively in the same geopolitical node, connecting very different Great Game trade strategies.

On May 29, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev officially inaugurated the first phase of the long-awaited flagship project Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), through which Caspian natural gas from the Shah-Deniz II field will be transported to Europe. The new project consists of several pipeline networks that pass through Georgia and Turkey (via the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline, TANAP) and further through Greece, Albania and Italy (via the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, TAP). As Shah Deniz Stage 2 is implemented, gas production will increase from 9 to 25 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year.

A day after Taliban fighters stunned the world with photographs of themselves embracing and celebrating Eid with personnel of the Afghan security forces, the Taliban leadership announced its decision not to extend the ceasefire. This dashed the hopes of millions of Afghans who were looking forward to a respite from the war. While the Taliban’s refusal to extend the ceasefire is disappointing, it is not the end of the road for the peace process. In recent months, Afghanistan has witnessed powerful demonstrations calling on the government and the Taliban to end the fighting. President Ashraf Ghani must draw on these peace constituencies to keep the peace process alive.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s visit to Washington was historic, being the first official visit of an Uzbek president since 2002. Mirziyoyev’s reception, and the breadth and width of agreements signed, constitute an acknowledgement of the reform process in Uzbekistan, as well as of the country’s newfound regional role and in particular its constructive approach to resolving the problem of Afghanistan. Washington’s engagement in these efforts will further improve the prospects of success in Uzbekistan’s domestic reforms and regional initiatives.

On April 23, after almost ten days of mounting popular demonstrations, Serzh Sargsyan resigned as Armenia’s Prime Minister. While public antipathy to him mounted throughout this interval, it appears that the army’s impending disintegration into pro and anti-Sargsyan groups was a decisive factor. Yet sadly but typically the Western media ignored one of this year’s major geopolitical stories – namely Armenia’s developing revolution – until Sargsyan resigned and even then covered it sporadically. Since Armenia and its capital Yerevan are off the beaten track, apparently they do not merit major news coverage. We should not emulate this mistake.

The “Velvet revolution” in Armenia raised concerns about the possibility of a Russian intervention in this South Caucasian republic, for the sake of preventing Russia’s key ally in the region from slipping into “Maidanization” and Armenia escaping Moscow’s foreign political and security orbit. Yet events that unfolded illustrated Moscow’s rather ambiguous attitude toward the country’s bottom-up regime change, something that Russian elites, fearful as they are of Western-inspired “color revolutions”, have otherwise done their best to forestall. The explanation for Moscow’s reception of Armenia’s revolution lies in Russia’s clout in Armenia, the character of the popular demonstrations and the regime, and Nikol Pashinyan’s reassuring stance toward Moscow and its interests throughout his campaign.

On March 26-27, 2018, the unprecedented international conference on Afghanistan, “Peace process, security cooperation and regional interactions,” took place in Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent. Diplomatic representatives of 21 states, the UN and the EU participated in the conference and signed its final Tashkent Declaration. The event signaled a transformation of Tashkent’s previous positions on Afghanistan, from past initiatives in the form of narrow formula-like approaches to a system-oriented strategy. However, the Tashkent Declaration and speeches given at the conference reveal that the approach contains too much diplomacy and too little solution, especially given the growing terrorism threat in the country.

The centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 2017 was a strange jubilee. Despite the revolution’s central importance in world history and its global importance, the centennial received scant attention in Russia. Most other post-Soviet countries plainly ignored it. The marginalization of the Revolution went along with a sharp decline in the popularity of Eurasianism, whose proponents emphasized the “symbiotic” or organic relationship between Russians and other ethnicities of the former USSR. Eurasianism also emphasized a Russia-centered historical narrative of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire. The decline of common historical space reflects a discursive and geopolitical vacuum, which the rising China will most likely fill.